


Free Until You Cut Me Down

by vegarin



Category: Dark (TV 2017)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:14:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25581922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vegarin/pseuds/vegarin
Summary: Hanno doesn't tell Elisabeth the truth: their savior has woven a delicate web of sanity and has been intent on snapping each thread every day. He tells her a lie instead. 'It's fine,' he signs. 'Everything will be fine.'In 2021, Hanno struggles with Jonas, who is waging a quiet war against Time.  Spoilers for all series, specifically S03E07.
Relationships: Elisabeth Doppler/Noah | Hanno Tauber, Jonas Kahnwald/Noah | Hanno Tauber
Comments: 33
Kudos: 115





	Free Until You Cut Me Down

**Author's Note:**

> One more Dark fic before I get back to the regularly scheduled WIPs that I swore I'd finish. It's just that this wouldn’t leave me alone.

* * *

"Don't do this again."

His words are harsh and rough, but Hanno can't hold them back, not with his heart hammering and his anger barely restrained as it is. His fingers, searching for clean bandages in the cabinet, are shaking and clumsy.

Jonas holds out his wrists, deceptively compliant, but he keeps his silence when Hanno tightens the bandages around them and he does not offer a single word acknowledging Hanno's demand. Time may always conspire to prevent any untimely death of Jonas Kahnwald, but the damage he regularly wreaks on himself is not always easy to fix nor easy to hide. They have maybe ten minutes or less, Hanno guesses, to put Jonas back together and mop the blood on the floor before Elisabeth returns.

A sliver of anger, unwise, slips away from him again, and Hanno grabs Jonas by his shoulders. "Promise me," Hanno demands again, digging in his fingers until Jonas winces and lifts his eyes to meet his. "Promise me you won't try this again."

"If I don't give you that promise, what will you do?" Jonas asks faintly. His eyes are a colour of fresh bruise. "Kill me?"

Without waiting for an answer, Jonas turns away and washes the blood off the small blade that he's used to cut his wrists. He returns it to Hanno, handle first, before moving on to scrubbing the floor.

Hanno takes in a deep breath, and another, and only when he feels steady enough to undo his fists, joins him in silence.

By the time Elisabeth returns to them with bowls of soup, all the evidence has been washed and tucked away. During dinner, Hanno speaks normally, and Jonas frequently tugs down his shirtsleeves to hide the telltale marks around his wrists.

Despite their best efforts, Elisabeth senses it anyway, as she always does.

 _'What's wrong?_ ' she signs to Hanno later that night, her face parchment-white. Her eyes briefly land on Jonas, quietly studying his books at his desk, before they return to Hanno.

Hanno doesn't tell her the truth: their savior has woven a delicate web of sanity, and has been intent on snapping each thread every day. He rubs off a streak of grime from her cheek and tells her a lie instead. _'It's fine,'_ he signs. _'Everything will be fine.'_

As always, she believes him.

* * *

On clear, moonless nights, the three of them sit outside their makeshift cabin, coffee warmed over a small bonfire, and watch the stars disappear one by one, until all of them vanish from the black sky.

 _'Tell me about our paradise,'_ Elisabeth signs, her eyes wide and full of longing. Her hair, in a long braid, is feather-light over Hanno's shoulder, and his world expands and shrinks along with her each breath. The conviction, as ever, thrums in his heart, in his soul _: I am meant to love her, and spend the rest of my life with her._

And at her request, testaments are spoken, fervent and impassioned. He tells her of their paradise, free of pain and sorrow. Where any pain that they've ever felt is erased. And one day, the passage will open, and they will walk through it together, to their paradise.

Elisabeth watches Jonas, who only wordlessly stares at the fire. She tugs at his jacket and asks him: _'What do you believe?'_

Hanno instinctively braces for a fierce refutation from Jonas, a clear denouncement of every word of the gospel. He braces for his own anger, in response, to flare and set ablaze.

Jonas unwraps his arms from around his chest. _'Someone told me once that God doesn't err.'_ His sign language is still awkward and inelegant, but Elisabeth is a patient teacher, and Jonas is as gentle and kind with her as he is never with himself. _'That_ _God has a plan. For all of us.'_

Jonas doesn't say he believes any of it, but this is sufficient enough for Elisabeth and her open heart. Hanno watches Elisabeth absorb the words and let them settle into her, for this moment placated and content.

Hanno watches Jonas, whose eyes still remain fixed on the fire, and wonders if he is wishing to learn what it's like to drown in the fire.

* * *

Almost every night Jonas returns from the power plant, muddy and seemingly mute in his misery. He scrubs off the radioactive decay from his coat and tries to remove the remnant of another day spent in failing to stabilize the God Particle with Claudia, while Hanno organizes the supplies he's managed to salvage during the day with Elisabeth. Resources are dwindling and turning scarcer each passing day, and every night Hanno decides they would have to venture out farther in the morning, and yet every morning he can't, not with the possibility of putting Elisabeth in danger.

After dinner, Elisabeth is asleep in her cot and Hanno sits at his usual corner, using a dull switchblade to whittle a little figurine for her birthday. Jonas remains hours at his desk instead of sleeping, surrounded by notes from the plant and piles of books carefully excavated from the ruins of schools and bookstores.

Every once in a while, Hanno sits back and watches Jonas turn the pages under the flickering sepia light, which draws shadows and fades the lines of his face.

"What do you learn from them?" Hanno asks.

He doesn't think Jonas would answer, but he does eventually, without pausing from taking notes. "Physics. And how time travel as we know it exists in defiance of all known laws governing physics."

Hanno continues to carve the wooden figure in his hand. "Books cannot teach you important things."

"Such as?"

"It doesn't tell you what it is like to believe. What it is like to know that your life has meaning."

"Or what it feels like at the moment when you are pulled apart, atom by atom," Jonas says quietly, neither disagreeing nor denying. "But it does tell you about division by zero."

"What about it?"

"That it's undefined and can't happen, and yet theoretically possible. An impossibility made possible."

Words and thoughts seem to linger in the air, and Hanno watches Jonas as he falls back into silence, eyes still on his books, contemplating possibilities and consequences that are far beyond Hanno's grasp.

In moments like this, it's difficult not to see a clear impression of Adam just beneath the flickering shape of Jonas. It's as if time is all it takes to whittle a truer shape beneath everyone's façade.

And time will also be all it takes to bring them close to the paradise that Adam promises.

Hanno believes it. Believes it with all in his heart.

To believe otherwise is unthinkable.

* * *

Jonas drinks enough arsenic to kill an elephant twice over, and while this particular effort leaves him a sick and shivering mess for two days, he does not die.

"Why bother with the attempt to bring the God Particle back to life," Hanno asks, once Jonas stops heaving into a bucket, "if you really believe you can successfully do this to yourself?"

"Hedging bets," Jonas says, rueful and wry, like you might find it funny if you looked hard from a specific point of view. "Just in case the house doesn't always win."

In a detached, abstract way, Hanno marvels at the disciplined, meticulous approach Jonas takes in methodically and scientifically prodding Time for a weakness, a single crack to wedge himself in and slip through. Time may yet blunder and overlook to prevent his death, he seems to be saying, and he will be there when it does, just by trying hard enough. All he needs is just that one time.

For all that Jonas clings to his belief that he will never become Adam, this whole undertaking—issuing an ultimatum and waging a war against Time, declaring to its face that he's tested it and found it decidedly lacking—is Adam in his entirety. It's an observation that Hanno wisely keeps to himself.

"You owe it to me to live," Hanno says, when he's tired of watching Jonas coughing and trembling in his bed. If his words come out menacing and threatening, he can't help himself. "Adam made me a promise. Your future self did."

"Your future self killed my friends and kidnapped me and sealed us to this fate," Jonas says, voice devoid of any accusation. "You'll forgive me if I don't believe I owe you anything."

"Just," Hanno says, breathing held in tight and unfurling his fists, "not in front of Elisabeth. Do you understand?"

She's almost caught it this time, and Hanno had to move Jonas to the bunker where he could suffer more in silence, while making up another excuse to her, telling her of a possible breakthrough at the plant keeping both of them busy.

"Fine," Jonas concedes, after a moment. He covers his eyes with his arm. "I wouldn't want her to be the one to find me, if it ever takes."

 _How many times do I get to see you kill yourself until you're satisfied?_ Hanno wants to ask, but Jonas has already carved out his answer, seared and branded, in his wounds being added daily, in every moment of suppressed pain, so he does not ask.

* * *

_'Tell me about the paradise,'_ Elisabeth asks again, in another moonless night.

As always, Hanno obeys her, obligingly and gladly. This is the only time his soul sings in pure contentment:

_'Paradise is free of pain and sorrow._

_Everything we've ever done is forgotten there._

_Any pain that we've ever felt is erased._

_And all the dead live again.'_

"They're Adam's words," Jonas says, long after Elisabeth falls asleep resting on Hanno's shoulder.

"They're our gospel," Hanno corrects him, in an odd moment of possessiveness.

" _You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose_ ," Jonas says, fleetingly, like he's reciting a poem. His voice is not quite low enough to fade into the quiet darkness. "It's from a book we had to read for a class once. Martha thought—" Jonas pauses, and Hanno watches the way his pale hands tighten around himself before he forces the rest of the words out, "She thought it was beautiful. I never understood it."

The surprise he feels at the rare mention of Martha almost makes Hanno forget his own low, shimmering anger. "Am I this murderer that you shaped, then?"

Jonas lifts his eyes from the fire and meets Hanno's, gaze still and even. "I was thinking of myself."

"You don't know what it really means to take someone's life." _Just your own_ , Hanno doesn't add.

Jonas returns his eyes back to the fire. "You don't know me."

The absurdity of the statement almost makes Hanno want to laugh. _My life has been dictated around you, for you, by you._ Hanno would say it, scream it, and yet, Jonas would never learn the true extent of it, until it's late. And then—

And then, Jonas would betray him. Hanno has often wondered how it would feel, to be betrayed by Jonas, and why he would ever let it happen. Despite scars being added daily, Jonas is still not a picture of someone hardened enough for this life. It would be easy enough to prevent this betrayal. After all, Hanno is the murderer that Adam shaped, and Jonas himself certainly wouldn't resist—he would welcome it, in fact.

And yet it's never been done. Because Time and fate would never dare to allow it.

Or if any of this is to go by, Hanno himself.

* * *

The next time it's Claudia who gets to intervene, and Jonas comes home looking like a drowned rat. Hanno sits at his corner and watches impassively while Jonas spits out the radioactive water that should've killed anyone else, cleans himself up, and goes right back to his pile of books, all before Elisabeth notices anything is amiss.

After Elisabeth goes to bed, Hanno continues to sit at his corner and whittle his little wood figurine and watch Jonas from the corner of his eye. The figurine needs for more work, still; its shape does not feel quite right to the touch when Hanno runs his hand over it.

"Just ask," Jonas says, well into that night, his eyes on his physic textbook steady and unwavering.

Once upon a time, when Hanno had first laid his eyes upon Jonas, he thought him soft and unassuming and in every way unequal to Adam—Adam, who's always held himself impossibly, inexorably in his chosen path. Yet, this Jonas is as unreadable as Adam has ever been.

And far more ephemeral, even when he's right in front of Hanno.

"Ask what?"

"The question you've been meaning to ask."

Hanno cuts into one corner of the wood figure and lets its peel slide onto the floor. The whittled shape is still not what Hanno has intended; he's taken off a wrong chunk of wood, and he may have to do this all over again. "When will it be enough?"

Jonas turns another page. "Until it wins—or I do."

Once upon a time, when Hanno had first laid his eyes upon Jonas, he saw confusion and desperation and determination in his openly haunted face, unlike Adam's, from where no single discernible emotion could ever be gleaned.

There's nothing Hanno could tell from his face now, as if all emotions have been dried up a long ago and left only fatigue in their wake.

Hanno is surprised to find that he's sorrier at their loss than he's ever imagined he would be.

* * *

Hanno realizes he's run out of bullets just as one of attackers reaches for Jonas. Hanno hits the man with the blunt end of his gun and whirls around, only barely managing to avoid a bat the second man is swinging at his head. Jonas throws himself at the second man and tackles him, sending both of them tumbling down the staircase.

The third one behind Hanno kicks him down. Hanno pushes himself up and comes back up swinging. The man knees him in the chest instead, and Hanno coughs and swallows blood. When he looks up, there's a pistol aimed at his face, and for a fraction of a second, Hanno thinks of Noah, and how he knows that this isn't— _can't be_ —the end.

It isn't. Jonas appears behind the man and hits him in the head with the bat. The man collapses bonelessly and does not get up.

Hanno takes a few seconds to insure that none of the attackers will get up ever again, and braces a hand over his knee to control his breathing. His instinct hasn't been wrong, and branching out farther for supplies was a definite mistake. He's thankful that they have at least managed to convince Elisabeth to stay home this one time.

When he looks up, Jonas is standing over the last man's body and staring at the bat in his hand, still and unmoving.

"Jonas," Hanno calls out cautiously.

Jonas drags his eyes away from his hand, and they land on Hanno's face. He frowns at the blood trickling from Hanno's head. "Let's see to that."

Hanno doesn't complain when Jonas sits him down and starts to patch up the cut on his head with sure, practiced hands. All the while, he doesn't miss the way that Jonas's eyes remain carefully and forcefully blank.

"They were going to kill us," Hanno is compelled to point out.

"They were," Jonas agrees readily—too readily—and quietly finishes bandaging Hanno's head. "Done."

Hanno catches Jonas's retreating hand. He feels the faint scars on the wrist under his fingertips and unwillingly tightens his grip. "We would be dead by now if we hadn't killed them first. Say it."

"We would be dead otherwise," Jonas repeats dutifully, voice mild.

"Tell me you understand."

"I understand."

"Then, tell me what the problem is."

After a moment of silence, Jonas turns to the bodies behind them. "You were right when you said I didn't know what this really meant," he says, with eyes that are withered and distant. "But we all learn eventually. All it takes is time."

Hanno knows this is just as he's always believed: time is all it takes to whittle a truer shape beneath everyone's surface. And time will also be all it takes to bring them close to the paradise that Adam promises. He can feel it, in his chest, in his soul, that they are close. So close.

And Hanno's heart should be glad for it, should be singing in gladdened joy at this very moment, but in the darkening light inside the dilapidated grocery shop they have come to scavenge, Jonas looks even less tangible, even more illusionary, than his impossible existence. There's a sudden, sharp pain in his chest that he can't only blame on the punch he's taken.

"Let's pack up here," says Jonas, trying to pull away from his grip. Without thinking, Hanno reflexively hardens his grasp and pulls him back. He foolishly, unwisely, wants to reassure himself that Jonas is still here, with him, in this world.

Jonas stares at Hanno's hand for a moment before unwrapping Hanno's fingers from his wrist. "Elisabeth will worry," Jonas adds, quelling any protest Hanno may have with mere three words, and turns away.

Elisabeth, when they return, touches Hanno's face with her gentle hand and looks up with concern.

 _'It's fine,'_ he tells her a lie. _'Everything will be fine.'_

And as always, she wants to believe him.

* * *

For Elisabeth's birthday, Hanno learns to bake a cake. Jonas, who has more experience with eating floury confections than Hanno ever has in his entire life, tries to help, rather ineptly. The end result is disastrous, and they produce a lopsided and oblong object that tastes of long-expire sugar and not much else, but Elisabeth hugs both of them fiercely and doesn't let go for some time.

There is a happy smile on her face when she blows out the candles and makes her secret wish. There's even a faint shadow of a smile on Jonas's face—or as close to one Hanno's ever seen on this particular face. When they finish licking every crumble from the cake on their plates, Hanno presents her with a little whittled figure of a woodland animal, just like her hat from pre-Time. It's far from perfect, but her eyes shine brightly, and her arms around him are snug and warm.

After a short moment of hesitation, Jonas presents her with a piece of photograph in a wooden frame. In the faded picture, a group of young teenagers stand with their parents in front of the school's entrance. Franziska is near the front with Elisabeth's parents. Hanno spots the Nielsens not too far away, with Magnus and Martha right in the center. And a young Jonas, with Hannah and Michael Kahnwald.

They all look terribly young, Hanno thinks.

 _'I got it from an yearbook,'_ signs Jonas, with a hint of shyness that suits the boy in the picture better than the one with them now. _'Found a copy in the storage room back at the school.'_

Elisabeth thanks him with a tight hug. Her eyes fill up with tears as she caresses the picture of her family. She has already wept and mourned their loss for so long that Hanno hasn't thought there was any tear left in her.

 _'You'll get them back again,'_ he promises her.

 _'I know,'_ she signs, and this time her tears have a hint of gladness in them, sheen of belief. She puts the photo up on the front wall, making it the first thing they see when they walk into the cabin.

That night, Hanno sees in his periphery, how Jonas lingers in front of the photograph and lifts his hand as if he might touch it, but never does.

Unlike Elisabeth, his eyes remain dry.

For once, wrapped in the glow of Elisabeth's happiness, Hanno doesn't sit up and take notice.

* * *

The door to the attic is blocked and would not open.

Hanno throws his weight at it and pushes, shoulder-first, again and again until the door begins to crack. The first thing he sees through the crack is a pair of legs swinging in the air, and the faded paintings by Michael Kahnwald on the wall. The muscles in his shoulders start to scream, but he ignores them in favor of pushing harder, faster, until the wood starts to splinter and break into pieces so he can hurl his body through the door.

A scene from a déjà vu greets him. Because he's already memorized every step and every move he has to make, he doesn't need to think at all as he cuts through the rope with his switchblade and ends on his knees when Jonas drops and crumples onto the floor. He grabs Jonas and unravels the knotted rope around his neck with trembling hands. He has been stupid, letting his guard down even just for one day, and this is the result.

Jonas coughs and comes back alive. When his eyes flutter open, Hanno wants to shake Jonas. Wants to beg. To plead. To do _anything_ , just to get him to _stop_. Hanno may have tried all of it, pleaded and begged and more, if he didn't already know that Jonas wouldn't ever stop. Not for him.

Hanno catches the moment that a glimpse of awareness enters those blue eyes, but he's still too slow to prevent Jonas from scrambling to his feet and reaching for the switchblade that Hanno had left—stupid, _stupid_ —on the floor.

Hanno staggers to his feet, propelled by the level of anger that he hasn't known before. He's going to take that knife from Jonas. He's going to take that knife from Jonas and beat him soundly until he _stops_.

Jonas puts the blade to his own neck that's already tattered and bruised.

Hanno stiffens on the spot.

"Just by living, I'm turning into him." Jonas looks intolerably calm—almost serene. As if he is already gone, and nothing can and will ever touch him. "I know you can tell, and so can I. Let me have this, for once."

It's the same quiet and still voice that claws at Hanno and leaves him feeling just as tattered and bruised. _How many times do I get to see you kill yourself until you're satisfied?_ Hanno thinks again, and takes two steps to reach Jonas and wraps his fingers around the edge of the blade that Jonas holds at his own neck.

"Don't," Jonas says, startled and raw, but Hanno, just as merciless and just as unkind, has no intention to listen, even as the blade cuts through his skin.

Jonas, pale and white knuckled, tries to wrench free from his grip, but Hanno holds fast, unrelenting, and his blood seeps between their fingers joined over the blade.

"Stop," Jonas pleads again, sounding strangely distraught. Hanno does not stop, just as Jonas never has. He watches dispassionately as all colours slowly bleed out of Jonas's face, as if it was him, not Hanno, currently bleeding all over the floor.

What Jonas sees in Hanno's eyes makes him slowly loosen the hold he has on the knife.

Only when Jonas lets it go completely and drops to his knees, Hanno does the same, and watches the blade fall between them onto the floor.

And he watches, still and unmoving, as Jonas fumbles around for something to stop the bleeding. Jonas finds a scarf and crawls over to Hanno to press it over Hanno's fingers, wrapping it tightly until the blood stops dyeing it red. Hanno watches Jonas's shaking and frantic hands. He watches the way Jonas's hair fall over his eyes and wants to brush it away. He still wants, ever so foolishly, to reassure himself that Jonas would stay solid under his hands when he touches him.

"Why do you always—" Jonas starts, only to stop, as if words are caught in his battered throat. His face is for once open and clear with despair, and his eyes are no longer dry when he looks up at Hanno. "Why couldn't you let me? Just once?"

The answer has always been clear. "Because my world doesn't exist without you," says Hanno, feverish and vehement. "And as much as I'm yours, you're also mine, and I won't let you go."

Hanno tangles his bloody fingers between the strands of sandy hair, and when Jonas doesn't dissipate from his touch, kisses him, fervent and devoted and with something that feels like worship. Jonas makes a soft, hurt sound, and it makes Hanno want to be rough and gentle at the same time. Hanno kisses him until tears are freely running from those eyes, until those lips are bitten red and bruised. He feels at once fervent and zealous, revering and perverted.

 _You're mine,_ Hanno thinks, _and I'm going to tie you to this unfair world that wants you to exist. I'll do everything to keep you._

Jonas lets his head fall on Hanno's shoulder, exhausted and hurt, and Hanno holds onto him, and doesn't let go.

Because Jonas will lead them to their paradise. Jonas will make everything right. And Hanno will make sure of it.

Until then, Hanno will hold him together.

* * *

**END**


End file.
